


creature fear

by inkspl0tches



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Ice, but like, in Season 10
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-10
Updated: 2017-08-10
Packaged: 2018-12-13 20:22:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11767647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkspl0tches/pseuds/inkspl0tches
Summary: Welcome to the top of the world. Please enjoy your stay.





	creature fear

This is their glacial thaw in the modern era. It is D.C. spring and his feet up on the office desk despite the protest of his knees. He smiles when she knocks on the open office door before coming in. This the ironically earth-bound slowness of them. She’s balancing coffee with one hand and deleting emails with another. The basement is losing its bleached smell, or she’s becoming accustomed to it. It used to matter to her, the difference between real change and careful self-delusion. Now, she breathes in deep.

“The world is melting, Scully.”

Monday morning, and he’s armed with the apocalypse.

“I watch CNN,” she says. “But good morning to you, too.”

She’d be bothered by his almost mind-read if she believed in that sort of thing. Still, this whole melting thing is just between us, she wants to say - never quite able to find the vein in her that runs holding her possessive streak and bleed it out. Four walls and an Ikea desk, and I’m bringing you coffee in the morning now, Mulder. We don’t always have to save the whole world. But he grins and she forgets it, her heart pumping into veins in her cheeks and fingers instead. She is warming to this all over again by convection, passing from him to her at a distance, radiating off the white walls and right into her careful skeletal structure. Warming by leaps and measures, from feet away. She thinks she wouldn’t mind now if he touched her.

He’s holding a closed folder between both hands. Everything is digital now, easily alphabetized and categorized, freeing office space. But if Mulder can’t cajole Ken in Supplies into ordering him a projector of Craigslist, he can work a printer. It’s a waste of paper, she tells him so, but even she likes the manila spine of the folders, the inverted tent between the web of her fingers.

She sets the coffee tray down and he readjusts his legs to make room for her, then fires the file across the desk with table top football speed. She catches is it before it goes flying off the edge of the table. Always, especially of late, able to beat him at his own games.

“Just thought you might find this interesting,” he says.

Scully holds out an expectant hand, and Mulder passes his reading glasses across the table.

12pt font, that familiar stocky black typewriter text. She wonders if he edits it to make it the same as before. Anyways: ICY CAPE, ALASKA,

She looks up, sending his glasses sliding down her nose. “You’re going to tell me we never turned in a report on this, aren’t you.”

He’s holding his coffee cup with both hands, like a child. “Look again.”

ICY CAPE, ALASKA, 2016.

She almost looks up again, but she can feel him watching her and doesn’t. She’s quiet for long enough, reading, that he can’t hold back and talks right over her attempts at thinking clearly.

“We already know what’s out there, Scully, and it makes sense that they’d re-surface again now, in the wildlife especially. It doesn’t take core samples anymore because the ice is melting and it's releasing God know’s what into our environment -- “

Monday morning and armed with the apocalypse. He can say melt all he wants, but she still knows that the temperatures in Icy Cape this time of year are hovering roughly around thirty below. There are parts of this she has not missed. She takes off his reading glasses and doesn’t smile. She thinks, _brilliant or expendable,_ and remembers his young, unfamiliar features, furious in the fluorescent glow of the base.

She says, “When do we leave?”

Disappointment flashes across his face at her lack of enthusiasm, caught in the corner of his mouth. He has innumerable tells and is somehow, still, not too old for pouting.

“Uh, Tuesday,” he says, letting her hold out his glasses without making a move for them. He clears his throat. “Pack warm.”

All her real winter clothes, the heavy stuff, are at his house. The thick blue mittens she’d used to help him build an absurdly tall snowman, up far enough on her tiptoes to make her feel like she was reaching for something far off but worth it. The industrious black gloves she’d worn to shovel the walk when he was too far gone to even realize it had snowed. A serious green scarf he’d helped her wrap and unwrap around her neck four times, catching her hair staticky against her cheeks in the process.

“I will,” she says. Her eyes drift back to her phone, face up on the desk. There’s a community email from her building. The subject reads: SPRING IS HERE!!!

She deletes it with a swipe of her finger.

\--

It makes perfect sense. Both the science and the nervous energy of this whole case. She does watch CNN. The prospect of thawing ice at the top of the world releasing ancient insects that defy human antibodies’ range of experience is not unbelievable in the slightest.

Maybe that’s what’s bothering her. The obviousness of this whole thing - so plaintive and obtuse is Mulder’s attempt to recreate history for no other reason than because she played some part in it - makes her head spin. She’d never really wanted to circle the drain with him. Eat her own tail and all that. She’d thought they were so far from Philadelphia.

“Why didn’t they call the CDC,” she says in the helicopter, over the beaten-air thrum.

“What?”

“The CDC. If it’s what you think it is, why didn’t they just call the CDC?”

He shrugs. “Who’s they?”

She reviews the file to avoid further conversation. It had not been scientists, this time, but hunters huddled up in their remote log cabin base. The woman’s sister says she hasn’t heard from her in almost three weeks. She fears the worst. Bears or ice or starvation, oh my.

What had tipped Mulder off, was a series of increasingly desperate emails sent from the woman to her sister in Utah, prior to the communications black-out. The emails were intermittent, but the last was dated roughly a month earlier. I don’t feel like myself, she’d said. It’s like I’m not who I am.

But Mulder could be tipped off by anything. What had landed the file, figuratively, in their basement, tagged as an addendum to the original Icy Cape case, was emails from several months back noting the appearance of a “gross” black rash on both the woman and her husband.

Scully closes the file. The dip-sway of the cold air is leaving her some kind of sick. She tries to force a feeling, to make herself reflect Mulder's easy excitement back at him, but she's always been one to grow where she's planted and running up against her own instinct feels like trying to reverse a carousel turn. This case feels less like new territory than it does an exercise in nostalgia and creature fear. Charted maps, redrawn with the Xs already thrown in.

“Melting,” she says to herself.

But Mulder has always been set on the idea that every word that passes her lips was meant for him to hear and respond to. She knows he knows the literal definition of rhetorical speech, but it doesn’t quite translate for a man who thinks every question has an answer.

He says, nodding, “Sink or swim.”

  
\--

They skip the Alaskan airfield this time, the helicopter carrying them all the way over the ghost of the Icy Cape Air Force Station - just the shadows of paved roads and to the outcropping of snowy hills that holds the log cabin as if between cupped palms.

As they hum close to the ground, the rotating blades whipping up snow, two dollhouse residents exit the cabin and wave up towards the sky. For fifteen unsettling seconds, Scully forgets she doesn’t believe in ghosts. Hail Mary full of -

“I guess they beat us here.” Mulder, ghost-believer, does not sound shocked or awed. Strangely, that doesn’t make her feel better. The doll-sized maybe-ghosts continue to wave.

“Who’s they?”  
  
“The sheriff and Dr. Branson.” He looks levelly at her. She takes an icepick breath. She thinks: _Then why did no one call the fucking CDC._

“You didn’t say there would be anybody else here.”

“I didn’t?”

She tenses her hands inside her gloves. She hates when talking to him is like fishing. All dropping a line and waiting and a prayer for luck.

“No, so why,” she starts, her voice flattening below sea level. She takes a breath to continue and it’s suddenly sucked out of her as the helicopter surges unexpectedly up and then down, jerking on a quick gust of cold air. Scully snaps her mouth shut on her tongue and tastes iron.

Mulder squints sympathetically at her, but they’re already landing. The pilot muttering expletives and shaking a shaggy head of hair. She wonders if every pilot on the Alaskan cape is cut from the same cloth Bear had been. She feels a twinge of pain for the lack of pain she feels thinking back on an old death. There’s only so many people she can mourn over thirty years. At least this pilot isn’t going to stay.

Mulder offers her a hand she pretends not to see as they make their way out of the helicopter. The now human-sized, non-ghosts, move towards them. An absurdly fat gray dog comes flying out from around the corner of the cabin.

“A medical doctor, two FBI agents, a sheriff and a dog. Where have I heard that one before?” Her boots are sinking only half-inches into the ice crusted snow. Mulder waves while she watches the ground.

“Are you about to tell me a really terrible joke?”

She knows deja vu is mostly dual neural processing and delayed signals. She also knows that that is not what this is.

“Something like that.”

“Nah,” Mulder says. “There were more of us last time. And no Sheriff.”

She blinks, unconvinced.

He smiles quick at her as the doctor and Sherriff get within speaking distance.

“Besides,” he says. “Dr. Branson is actually an entomologist.”

Scully is briefly yet fully enamored with the idea of putting a bullet through his head. Bouncing finally into her personal space, the fat grey dog licks the tip of her trigger finger.

\--

Everything up until now has been nostalgia, that old one-trick pony killer. All he had to do was put his feet up on some cheap Ikea desk and, boom, she’s got a memory that only plays in rosy pink like a defective drive in screen.

But one-trick ponies got old and boring and mean and dangerous. And the defective drive in screen eventually meant they closed the whole goddamn thing down so that lovebirds in the backs of cars would have to find somewhere else to be so romantic.

Doing this again, almost identically, might mean forgetting things she worked hard to learn. She does not want him to be unfamiliar.

Scully purses her lips, hangs back into the cold wind as he greets the sheriff and the doctor. His smile, the way he talks with his hands, makes him look thirty-one again.

There were years when she thought they’d never live long enough to be this old.

\--

The cabin is low-slung, hung way back on its haunches, prepared to crouch out the snow. There is a slanted meat-shed that rests against the left exterior wall. The dog trots dutifully after Scully as she makes her way inside and is struck by the smell of disinfectant and smoke.

Sense memory is her favorite kind because it is the most physical - a tissue-deep red ribbon knot. The smell of death is so familiar to her that she finds it almost comforting, in a sick kind of way. It is a thing she knows how to treat. The long-cold have always been her easiest patients, with Mulder falling far on the other end of the spectrum. The dead and Mulder. Mulder and the dead. Her hot and cold-blooded tragi-loves.

The dog sniffs at the cabin’s wide first room, around the base of the ratty couch and easy chairs. Disinfectant and smoke - she doesn’t smell the sweet base note of rot. The dog whines and scratches at something under the couch, and she tenses. This could go seven kinds of wrong if she and Mulder didn’t get their shit together. _This is why_ , she thinks, _someone should have called the CDC._

But the dog pulls back from the couch with only a piece of rawhide to chew on. Scully breathes. And then lowers her voice to a toneless singsong as the dog trots back to her.

“C’mon, boy,” she says, “Where are they? Where are - “

“The bodies?”

Scully hasn’t jumped in years, but she does flinch.

On her right, Dr. Branson smiles. “Sorry,” she says. “I was just wondering the same thing. He was here when we got here. Do you think he knows?”

The dog looks stupidly content as Dr. Branson pets its head. Scully does not think the dog knows, but she also can’t explain the way she’d been ready to sing-song her way through the discovery of more death because she hadn’t really known how to handle her life without it.

Dr. Branson saves her from having to speak. She holds out the hand that is not touching the dog, her right, which leaves Scully to awkwardly half shake with her left. “Amanda,” she says. “We didn’t really get introduced. Your partner’s a talker.”

Behind them, just barely through the slim doorway, she can hear the familiar thrum of Mulder’s voice. He has moved beyond the initial perfunctory introductions into a series of offbeat questions about the weather. From the sheriff's level of engagement, she guess he’s yet to launch his super-psychosis worm theory.

She smiles thinly at Dr. Branson. There’s still, although she tries to avoid it, some degree of blacktop sibling territory (hey, only i get to do that) to her gut reaction when it comes to other people and Mulder. He is easy to tease.

“Dana Scully,” she says.

Amanda nods. “I don’t suppose you have any idea what we’re out here for? I mean, I know there’s gotta be bodies around here somewhere, but that’s not really my thing.” The dog whines for further attention and Amanda crouches again, picking up the mindless petting like knitting needles.

She’s not sure how much Mulder has told these women. If he was the one who called them in the first place, even. She knows him too well to assume he’s been forthcoming. Almost incidentally, she finds herself sinking into his paranoia like boots into fresh snow or shoulders into an old coat.

“Yes,” she says, carefully. “I would assume there are.”

Amanda snorts. She is fiercely young, maybe twenty-nine, probably not long out of grad school. She has clean cut blonde hair and a pockmark on her left cheek. At twenty-nine, Scully had seen her first man die. Not dead man, not a cadaver, a man dying, buried deep in the throes of it. Bleeding out in front of her, seizing on a table. And to think about it now, she can only really remember the iron tinge of the smell of blood. The way she’d said, “He’s dead” and it had made her feel powerful, like she was the one who got to parse out the give and take of the thing, of life. At twenty-nine, she’d spent all but three seconds outside Mulder’s basement door, her fist raised, waiting to knock.

The dog thumps his tail against the floor. Amanda says, “Come on, Agent Scully. You’re FBI.”

“I’m not sure what you mean by that.”

“I mean,” she cocks her head. “You’ve gotta have a better idea of what’s up than we do. Your partner talks too much to not know anything.”

Boots into fresh know. Sink down and settle.

She says, “We’ve seen something similar in the past. Depending on what we find here, it could be a parasite of sorts.”

The flame lick of brute shame she feels up her stomach is brief. She is not lying to her, she decides. She’s just being careful, rational. There’s no reason to spark panic if there’s nothing to find here but a month old murder.

“A parasite?” Amanda straightens up from where she’d been crouching to pet the dog. Her eyebrows shoot up in a childlike moment of excitement that tugs on Scully’s tissue deep sense memory, says, You’ve seen this before.

Amanda brushes her hands off on her jeans, when she looks back up she’s tamped down whatever instinctive Entomologist's enthusiasm had been triggered by the parasite mention. She says, “Why, uh, if you don’t mind - why did no one call the CDC?”

Scully grins. She decides, twig snap quick, that she likes Amanda.

\--

She find the bodies in the meat-shed. Of course. There is still no sick-sweet rot smell to tease at the margins of Scully’s sense memory - the cold has frozen the bodies nearly solid, but she knows the silence of death when she doesn’t hear it. The dog sniffs and yaps and nips around the prone figures like he had around the hidden rawhide. She is reminded of Queequeg with a pang.

“Mulder,” she calls, leaning back out of the doorway. The wind snatches at the long ends of her hair.

“Hmm?”

She moves further into the shed to allow him space to come in, crouching and shooing the dog. The cold has all but halted the natural process of decay. Rigor mortis having set in and settled in for a serious stay. Both the man and woman are Alaskan bush burly, chapped lips and skin instead of the marble of city cadavers. They’re dressed warm. They look ready to survive the elements.

“God,” Mulder says, moving in behind her. She can hear the disgust in his voice and it makes her lips curl. It took her years to realize she enjoys showing him the truly disturbing in the same way he enjoys presenting her with the inexplicable. Her therapist might find that interesting. “You could have warned me.”

“Sorry, G-man.” She leans in closer to the woman’s body, fingering the revolver at her side. She is faceless, frozen in the moments after she must have shoved the gun against a chapped cheek in the snow brightness and blown herself into a different kind of white light. The tissue’s state of disrepair around the gaping head wound is fascinating in the way Scully has always been interested in the human’s ability to repair itself, but only to a certain degree.

She hears Mulder crouching by the man, fallen perpendicular to his wife. His eyes are open, bulging, the bruises around his neck indicating some degree of amateur asphyxiation. His chest blown apart by two uneven revolver shots.

“You think these were love taps, too?” He points a hovering finger to the bullet wounds.

She flicks her gaze up from the woman’s fingers to his face. He rubs his shoulder to make sure she gets the hint and she rolls her eyes.

“Murder-suicide,” she says, pulling a plastic bag from her backpack for the gun. “Crime of passion, or something.”

“‘Or something,’” Mulder says as he stands. “Is that your official opinion, doctor?”

She rolls her neck back on the atlas vertebrae. She could have this conversation with him in her sleep. She probably has.

“My official opinion is that I can’t do an autopsy until there’s some degree of thawing here. Ice is not conducive to thorough investigative work.” She wipes her gloves on her pants, only just realizing she can’t feel her fingers. Back at the cabin, when Mulder had pulled her outside to look around, the sheriff and Amanda had been trying to get the heat on.

“But prior experience is,” Mulder says.

She cocks her head. “Oh?”

“Scully.”

The dog nudges her knee. She looks down at its fat gray face, its wolfish snaggletooth. “I’ve seen nothing to suggest parasitic activity in either these bodies or in the surviving, accessible hosts.”

“You just told me you couldn’t give an official opinion because you can’t do an autopsy.” Mulder is shifting his weight from side-to-side like he’s on a starting line. She hates when he does that. He’s always done it, and she’s always hated it in the way you hate the ugliest chair in your mom’s living room. Senselessly and complete with plots for revenge. In the way you can only hate something that doesn’t matter at all.

“That doesn’t mean I am going to rely on our shared case history as though it’s some sort of outline to fit our assignments into twenty-years later, Mulder. I have seen no evidence that - “

He’s smiling at her, that asshole. Smiling and shifting like he’s on a starting line and knows he’s gonna win the race. He shrugs. “No evidence, Scully. I get it.”

She avoids looking at him, picking up the plastic bag of evidence. She thinks she’ll leave the bodies here through the late afternoon to see if the temperatures dip enough for some kind of cutting action. If not, they’ll load them up tomorrow morning and she can do it from the comfort of an Alaskan town morgue. Put some thick glass between her and Mulder the Easily Disgusted.

“What is your opinion then, unofficially?” He’s following her to the door. Snow in her boots and Mulder and the dog on her heels.

She thinks about the woman and her husband and the flat expanse of white out here. How they must have felt they were going boldly where no man or woman had gone before. She knows that addictive, singular closeness, how quickly closeness can turn to claustrophobia. How unfathomable it is to face the world outside the cabin door alone and how unthinkable it is to stay.

“Some kind of cabin fever,” she says, finally. It’s one of her least favorite things about herself that she is always unable to resist the bait when he holds it out. Very Pavlovian, their push and pull. Which means it’s mostly one and none of the other. “There have been studies that the folk term actually has a significant basis in real elements of psychosis. Depression, irrational behavior, boredom - all in reaction to extreme isolation or confinement.”

He smiles again. She remembers how much the idea of killing him had charmed her earlier, purely hypothetically, of course. Love tap-tap-tap. “How many times have you seen The Shining, Scully?”

“Oh, shut the fuck up, Mulder.”

She knows he’s shrugging, his little-boy “Who me?” smile turning the corner of his cheek. She knows even though she can’t see him, turned away towards the door and the way back to the cabin. She doesn’t need to see him anymore. She’d completed her study and turned in the report years ago.

He says, “I’m just wondering if all work and no play is making Scully a dull girl.”

He’s a shit. She thinks about his side-to-side restless sway. His baiting her for a theory like ringing a bell. She calls back, the wind tugging at the words: “Familiarity breeds contempt.”

“Wow. We’re using cliches as case theories now.” Mulder whistles low as the meat shed door shudders closed behind them.

His voice follows her out: “Heeereeee’s Scully!”

\--

Back inside the main cabin, the Sheriff and Dr. Branson have managed to locate the generator and kick up the heat. The main room smells darkly of coffee and someone has revved up the little wood stove in the corner where it hisses with a hot metal tongue.

Mulder had managed to beat her to the door, swinging it wide open for her. She’d ducked under his arm, shaking the blown snow off her gloves as she stomps out her boots. Mulder reaches to help her with her coat. They’d never talked about how to handle their somewhat indelicate history when coming back to work together. It’s not as though they played very often or very well with others. Alone in their closed up little basement, with only the skylight for natural company, they could pretend anything they wanted. Still, she finds herself pushing his hands away as she frees her right arm. She feels half-certain that other people can smell it on her, the way she can identify rot, the perfumed airs of love gone bad.

“The meat-shed is full,” Mulder says, stepping away from her too quickly. She doesn’t look at him to see if he’s offended. He shrugs off his own coat easily.

Amanda nods. “We could smoke something to eat? Although, I feel a little weird eating someone else’s food. You think we’ll be out of here by tonight if we don’t find anything?”

Scully shakes her head. “What he means is we found the bodies. In the meat-shed.”

“Oh,” Amanda says. “Uh.”

Mulder shrugs, dropping heavily into one of the chairs at the table in the back half of the room. The far wall makes up the kitchen, and the coffee smell is strongest over there. It draws Scully moth to flame style. She talks as she goes.

“They’re too frozen to do an autopsy right now. I’m going to wait until later this afternoon to see if the temperature will drop enough that I can do at least a partial dissection. The tissue around the wounds is incredibly well preserved, maybe well enough to take some kind of sample for testing if we had the capability here. Which we don’t. There is some pretty obvious bruising on the throat, though, and very little needs to be said about the gunshot wounds - although the facial wound was - ” She pauses near the pot on the little cast iron stove. “Does anyone mind if I have some coffee?”

She’s met by blanket silence. Looking over her shoulder, eyebrow raised, she can see Amanda looking at her with wide eyes, leaning against the nearest wall. The sheriff, a short dark haired woman roughly Mulder’s age who hasn’t spoken since introducing herself and whose name Scully promptly forgot, is rubbing her upper lip. Scully looks at Mulder, just in the way you might glance out the window to check the weather when you’ve just come from outside, and he smiles soft around the edges.

She thinks as she blinks herself back into focus, _He’s just used to me_. She doesn’t think she was ever the one that took getting used to. She is reminded of years of motel room coffee with Mulder, burnt on her tongue while she suggested fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, of discussing Cotard’s Delusion over take out Chinese. She’s selectively socialized, even now. No longer fit for general consumption.

“So who killed them?” The sheriff says, bringing her hand away from her face. Her voice is deep and loud, the hint of some unidentifiable backwoods accent that sands down the edges of her words.

“Um.” Scully turns away from the coffee, half-leaning against the stove. “It’s difficult to say without any actual examination, but I would say it appears that the woman - “

“Mrs. Bradley,” the Sheriff says.

“I’m sorry?”

“It was Mr. and Mrs. Bradley that lived here, ma’am.”

Scully nods, at once both nervous and terribly sorry. She’s a doctor, bedside manner has never been a problem for her. Not for the last five years. “Of course, I apologize. It appears that Mrs. Bradley attempted to strangle her husband, whether that was successful or not is difficult to tell. She then shot him, possibly post-mortem, though I can’t be sure. She then shot herself in the head.”

The sheriff nods sharply but doesn’t say anything else. Amanda exhales from across the room. Scully scrapes once, hard, down her pointer nail with her thumb.

“Jesus,” Amanda says, finally. “And they’re thinking what, rabies? From some kind of an insect bite?”

Scully says, “Who’s they.”

“Whoever brought us out here,” Amanda shrugs. “The federal government? I got an email three days ago from the Federal Forestry Service. I’m an entomologist -- if it’s not some kind of insect related phenomenon then why get in touch with me?”

Scully nods, sucking in her lower lip until she feels it go numb. She stares hard at the back of Mulder’s neck, hoping to create her own pinpricks until he’ll turn around. _The Federal Fucking Forestry Service?_

The sheriff is looking into her own coffee mug, rubbing her lip again with one hand. “They were real nice people, the Bradleys. Real nice.”

Clinical detachment is learned in med school. The almost brutal ease with which Scully could erase a corpse’s face, a childhood scar, a c-section line running up the stomach - anything to suggest a history before the slab, was a finely honed skill. But the sheriff says “real nice,” and she is reminded that people know the dead, even the dead no longer know them. She sucks in a breath, moving from the kitchen sink to sit hard on one of the wooden chairs, thinking of her mother.

Mulder says, “Your coffee, Scully,” and puts the mug down in front of her. She thinks: _Federal Fucking Forestry Service_ , and does not thank him.

Amanda rubs her hands together, looks around with a slow blink like she’s not sure why she’s here or what to do next. Scully begins to feel the thaw in her fingers and nowhere else. Outside, the sky is going bruised with the promise of snow.

“Hey,” Amanda says, suddenly. “Has anyone seen the dog?”

Scully feels the warmth slip from her fingers like the snap of a magician's table cloth. Disappeared. 

 

- 

to be continued. 

**Author's Note:**

> I don't write chapter-fic ever. Like ever. And especially not chapter fic that verges on casefile territory. This is a bit of an experiment for me, so here's a preemptive apology if it blows up in all of our faces. 
> 
> Big thanks to the lovely @kateyes224 for her word prompt (even if you haven't seen most of the words yet)! They were: Heretic, boldly, promise, morsel, almond, betray.


End file.
